Tracing the discourse networks behind politicisation: The case of international migration

While a vast amount of literature on politicisation has focused on the actors that drive the process of politicisation, the role of discourse networks has largely been overlooked. In issue areas such as European integration or immigration, scholars have focused on the key actors responsible for politicisation, and most often have identified radical right populist parties as the main driving forces. However, the contents of these politicisation processes mostly remain unclear. We observe that political actors emphasise certain aspects and deemphasise others, which influences the way the audience thinks about the issue. This is called ‘framing effect’. Which kinds of frames and discourse networks are behind politicisation waves? Which frames are being advocated by which kinds of actors, and what levels of conflict do these frames arouse? These dynamics are crucial to explain politicisation, since some frames may be more politicised than others, and known key actors might engage differently in different sub-issue fields. Studying politicisation through the lens of frames is useful to analyse processes of depoliticisation as well, as it offers a framework to explain the temporal and sequential evolution of politicisation/depoliticisation processes. Moreover, politicisation has mostly been studied in national settings such as national elections or social movements. Through our study of international migration, we provide a new toolkit to study international patterns of politicisation. We aim to make this contribution by studying discourse networks in two major debates in the field of migration between 2000 and 2020: modern slavery and the European migration crisis. The modern slavery debate looks into the interconnected issues of modern slavery, forced labour, and human trafficking. The European migration crisis debate studies how ‘migration into Europe’ has been framed from earlier on before the phenomenon came to be known as a ‘crisis’. We use Agence France Press as our source to capture international news articles between 2000 and 2020, which lead to roughly 5,000 documents in each of these debates. Using the innovative method of Discourse Network Analysis (DNA), we trace, visualise, and compare the politicisation of frames, the most important actors and coalitions involved in the process, and the networks through which these frames are promoted. By conceptualising political debates as networks in which actors are connected by shared agreement on (bundles of) frames, we focus on different sub-networks and discourse coalitions. These are bound and separated by their adherence to polarising frames, ultimately highlighting which frames are more responsible in driving modularity and, therefore, politicisation. We find that although similar discourse coalitions are active in both debates, they advocate and politicise different frames in these two debates. Deep disagreement about the nature of the problem leads to more fractioning among clusters in the modern slavery debate (criminal law, human rights law, labour law), whereas the European migration crisis debate maintains a bipolarised coalition structure throughout (human rights law versus criminal law). Our paper makes empirical, theoretical, and methodological contributions and will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of political networks, public policy, international organisations, and migration.